“Interesting” is both the go-to faint praise for managing a conversation about someone’s mediocre art (“I thought it was really, um, interesting”) and the highest value to which contemporary creative work aspires. Beauty could never hold that dual responsibility. You can’t bullshit someone by telling him his terrible modern dance piece with spasms of sexualized coughing fits was “really, um, beautiful.” Interestingness is not a passing trend. The German social theorist Niklas Luhmann argued that every social system has its own binary code (in law, it’s legal/illegal, in business it’s profitable/unprofitable), and art’s has been interesting/uninteresting since the advent of modernism. It used to be beauty, but beauty got kicked to the curb just like moral instruction several centuries prior, according to Luhman. That would come as news to fans of Andrew Wyeth paintings or the crowds who throng to André Rieu concerts, but to anyone who has seen the inside of a seminar room in an art or music department, the primacy of interestingness is axiomatic.

What makes something interesting is open to debate, which is exactly the point. (more…)